Grimshaw wins the 2024 RIBA Stirling Prize for the Elizabeth Line: seven carefully chosen pieces on urban public transit, free for registered users
‘It all seems so calm and ordered now, but it must have been hell to make,’ the AR’s editors wrote in their write-up of Michael Hopkins & Partners’ (now Hopkins Architects) new Westminster London Underground station in the June 2000 special issue on the Jubilee Line Millennium Extension. ‘Worth it though.’ It was the latest, sparkling addition to the London Underground transit system at the turn of the millennium, and remained so until the Elizabeth Line was inaugurated in 2022, nearly a quarter-century later.
As Grimshaw, Maynard, Equation and AtkinsRéalis’ designs for the Elizabeth Line pick up the 2024 RIBA Stirling Prize, the AR delves into its recent archive for analysis and meditations on the design of public transit. Stories of train stations old and new, creative commutes, gentrification, and chthonic mythologies illustrate the entanglements of public transport with politics and financial speculation, as well as the everyday cultural imaginary of cities.
The seven stories below are free to read for registered users for a limited period. Happy reading!
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Underneath the politics: Westminster London Underground station in London, United Kingdom, by Michael Hopkins & Partners, AR June 2000, AR Editors
‘In the huge escalator box, space is awesome, almost Piranesian, articulated by the civil engineers’ columns and flying beams’
Typology: Train station, AR May 1922, Tom Wilkinson
‘The great sheds of iron and glass discharged the traveller into smooth, industrial space, while the adorned facades mediated the relationship between this frightening new expanse and the traditional space of the urban street’
Outrage: Prague station dismantled, AR February 2024, Jan Bureš and Adam Štech
‘The problems of the station’s surrounding area, which many people consider to be the most neglected part of Prague, is not a problem of the terminal building’
Caught on the commute: books written in transit, AR May 2022, Edwina Attlee
‘We catch the morose self-pity of a Monday morning, and the bitchy judgements about other women’s clothes’
Going underground: Metro station in Santiago, Chile by Beals Lyon Arquitectos, AR April 2021, Pedro Ignacio Alonso
‘When the pandemic hit the city, the metro system never really closed despite localised lockdowns; people still needed to take the metro to go to work’
Revisit: High Line, AR July/August 2024, Peter Lucas
‘Freight trains used to push along the ground‑level railway lines, but unwieldy traffic caused significant casualties – earning the passage the nickname “Death Avenue”’
Core beliefs: the underground is full of stories and structures, AR April 2021, Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita
‘States tend to find ways to appropriate subterranean land or its contents, whether for themselves or on behalf of corporations’
